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15.
ON LIVING BRAVELY

244

Who is The Watcher?

You need courage to study each moment for its
readiness. The moment for seeding intentions may come only after brutal
contests between rival intentions in opposing self-states. It takes
practice and training to set your interventions into the slipstream of
time with minimal disruption during the disintegration of the
personality. To accomplish these tasks requires the presence of a
least-operative self, the Watcher.
Only the Watcher can play all possibilities and yet be able to select
one at the right moment.
To find the Watcher is an acquired not an inborn
skill. You must seek out Who is left of me when I am lost in the
turning drama. You must ask, What is it in me that feels the
deconstructed scintilla of subtle sensations? Who does the intending?
Who has perspective on a sub-personality while in it? Who recognizes a
fantasy while having it? Who is the “me” that is there when “I” am
gone? The answer: the Watcher.
I experience it as a bare center of awareness left
over in the depatterning of the passing rules (See # 76-81.) Do not
confuse this still-point for the part of you that makes the ego’s
choices. It is smaller than that. I know it as a part of me that sits
quietly by, observing other parts of me, small because it makes no
claims and goes along with all changes, a kind of eye of calm in every
storm, quiet but keen and alert, a way of being in the world
characterized by equanimity, intelligence, dispassion, steadiness,
imperturbability – a self but not too much of a self, a relatively
selfless self, the least operative self still capable of attending,
accompanying a decision and joining an action.
I first experienced the denuded I-sense in my
teenage years. I discovered that when I was in a state of low arousal
some part of me inside was always brightly awake, alert, energized,
dancing with vigor and watching. Moreover, with this, I came to believe
I had encountered the core, the inner eye, the place of the observer in
me, and I called it the Watcher.
I noticed that when we focus on something and we are
aware we are focusing on something, neither the thing we focus on, nor
our focusing is the Watcher. But the part of us that is aware we are
focusing on something is the Watcher. It watches caring, but it doesn’t
care. No joy, no grief touches the Watcher. But the Watcher watches the
joy and grief. However, the Watcher is not remote or indifferent; it is
interested. Curiosity it has, and mild amusement. It is emotionally
thin, uses few words, and mainly keeps quiet, but it can issue verbal
commands and can intervene in action. In this least operative self, we
have the clearest vision to recognize the shifting phases of the causal
texture of our surroundings while having the least susceptibility to
being swept away by it. It takes this small self to navigate the
turbulence of the turnings and to seed intentions with proper timing.
When it finds the watcher, the I-sense links to
presentness itself. But presentness is not a simple state. It too
passes. The Watcher functions with the same state dependency as our
other identity states. While it holds steady, if we are quiet in the
turning drama, the Watcher can focus on the intention without panic or
clinging, without presumption or resignation to mystery and authority,
enduring its uncertainty. The Watcher can plant intention in the
turning moment by electing it, and with slight amusement, even in
trepidation, can empower the deed that comes next. The non-reactivity
of the relatively selfless self, however, does not make it passionless,
because passion may be necessary for choice. The choice is fueled by
passion but aimed by non-reactivity. As the surgeon’s knife is steady
but empowered by the fire of effort, so in our turning moments we are
both passionate by virtue of our caring and yet, by allowing and
observing this passion to flow, we are non-reactive.
Emily Dickinson was the American poet par excellence of the Watcher and
the choices it could make. She celebrated it in many moods.

Of all the souls that stand
createI have elected one.When sense from spirit files
away,and subterfuge is done;

When that which is and that
which wasApart, intrinsic, stand,And this brief tragedy of fleshIs shifted like a sand;

When figures show their royal
frontAnd mists are carved away, –Behold the atom I preferredTo all the lists of clay!

245

The Prime Doer

I know now that what I called the Watcher when I was
young has no spiritual status. It is one among many of our modular
personalities, though not one easily accessed. With skillful efforts,
however, as part of a meditative practice, one can reach it in quiet
moments. It surfaces on its own in extenuating circumstances.
In my youth, I didn’t understand the ontological
status of the Watcher, or its special virtues. As I learned more about
Eastern thought, I came to dismiss my experience as trivial, thinking
that if Patanjali was right the Watcher would soon dissolve into a
greater emptiness. But mine didn’t, so I figured I was stuck at a
lesser place. For decades, I looked for the deeper ground and though I
experienced many unusual states of consciousness that fit the
descriptions I came upon in Eastern books none of them seemed
necessarily deeper.
Eventually I came to understand that the Watcher was
less a witness than an actor. Its depth and virtue appeared in action.
It held the stage at the instant the intended action began. It was less
the Watcher than the Prime Doer for whom life was an adventure in
onceness. (I only got a sidelong glance at it from the meditative state
when I was young, so it looked like a “Watcher” to me. However, when I
was meditating, I was just “practicing”; I was not at the crux of
change. So I did not comprehend its power as a doer.)
The denuded I-sense, I discovered, held the
all-important spark of common sense in it. I found that when the chaos
came and my will, passion, epiphanies, and intuitions were scattered,
my common sense remained intact. Common sense is the mind of the
Watcher/Prime Doer. However, that mind is only good for the simplest
observations and the smallest choices. Yet when I look over my life
those small choices have guided me best. The decisions I made, though
softly enunciated, became the springboards for all subsequent action.

246

Having covered the basics, we can now devise a
strategy for morally based worldly action on the following principles:

o Intention, imagination and
imagery held in a stabilized internal sensory field, under the aegis of
the Watcher, provide the materials the diminished I-sense needs to
steer a readiness into worldly action.

o In this process, the imagination
becomes the link between the soul and nature. Responding to the
products of our own subtle sensory awareness, it decodes the
chronobiological carrier waves generated on the mind/body edge.

o By the strength of its presence,
imagination can tip the turning process in a desired direction at the
right moment. But only then.

o The incandescent imagination,
flaring with life in those charged moments, becomes the mightiest of
the tiny neural agents that we can bring to bear to open the fan of our
destiny.

247

The Romantic Poets understood the power of
imagination.
The literary critic Frederick Pottle, though he
acknowledged that “it is hard for us nowadays to understand why Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley made such a fuss about the
imagination” goes on to explain that “Wordsworth and Coleridge were
convinced that imagination was creative; and they wished to make
imagination not merely creative but a power for apprehending truth.”5
In Book VI of The
Prelude, William Wordsworth focused directly on the power of the
imagery/intention complex:

in such strengthOf usurpation, when the light
of senseGoes out, but with a flash that
has revealedThe invisible world, doth
greatness make abode,There harbors; whether we be
young or old,Our destiny…6

He is saying that there is a ‘flash’ moment in the turning process when
the light of outer sense goes out, and in this moment, we get a sudden
glimpse of a reality to come. Some of what we construe then, decoded
from carrier waves by physiological processes I dealt with earlier,
tells us about ourselves, about our potentialities, but some tells us
about the possibilities in human nature more broadly, or about the
historical moment and its promises and perils. Taken together, these
revelations become auguries of the future.
In the flash moment, much happens. One’s model
changes. One briefly experiences or rehearses what it would be like to
live in the world in a new way. Nevertheless, we inhabit a joint field,
filled with other living beings, so we do not have easy access to these
elevated moments. To act and create in new ways in rare “spots in time”7 depends on subtle
alignments of inner and outer rhythms.
The “spots in time”, because they are
transformational moments, manifest in the hubs of turning points. In
Wordsworth’s accounts, they hit when reversals impended; they popped up
in scary and ominous times, particularly in events that touched on
mortality, as in his youthful premonition of his father’s death.
Wordsworth believed that these experiences, if
recollected appropriately on later occasions, would have the force of
continuing epiphanies.

So feeling comes in aidOf feeling, and diversity of
strengthAttends us, if but once we have
been strong.Oh! mystery of man, from what a
depthProceed thy honours.

In the concluding book of The Prelude, he makes clear that in
our creative universe, imagination gives us our fullest link to the
whole.

This spiritual Love acts not
nor can existWithout Imagination, which, in
truth,Is but another name for
absolute powerAnd clearest insight, amplitude
of mind,And reason in her most exalted
mood.This faculty hath been the
feeding sourceOf our long labour…8

248

Planting the Imagery/Intention Complex in
the Turning Moment

When the consensus world crumbles and the ties to
the past break and the model dissolves, you enter a state where body
and mind grow more intimate with each other (I do not say comfortable)
by virtue of these downfalls. Though fearful and desperate, one feels
put upon, extremely exercised, at a limit, down to a last extremity.
Physical presence, intensified by internal sensations, commands the
mind.
In the near-chaos conditions of the turning moment,
our attending, our conscious awareness itself, when attached to an
intention made vivid by imagery, generates a phase resetting. In the
turning, your own intentions perturb you. The instant you rise to the
perturbation, a choice point comes, a temporal pivot from which the
rays of your potentialities extend in alternate directions.
With the right training and motivation, people can
learn to etch volitional efforts into the autonomic circuitry of the
central nervous system, utilizing their own neuroplasticity as an
ethical and aesthetic medium for change.
The raw ingredients for change come up from the
neutral traits. (See # 213-214) We develop them using the joined powers
of the technical and ethical minds.
Without new tools for self-examination, however, we
cannot walk the technical/ethical boundary zones, so we will not get
far with our changes. Nevertheless, the upwelling from the neutral
traits does push us toward self-examination and from it, we begin to
build bridges between phenomenology and the world detected by
instruments using the methods I have described here.
They produce effective action with the least
expenditure of energy. They keep us from hitting dead-ends or running
in circles. To push the levers of change we do best by employing
low-mediated intentions.

249

In our highly charged, high power technological
civilization, the whole notion of low-mediated intention with its
architectonics of imagination must strike the reader as strange,
self-deceiving, and even delusory.
What can we do with low-mediated intentions that we cannot do with
brute force? The question hints at its answer. However, let’s push the
objections further. Can we, for instance,

1) use low-mediated intentions to
shift the bifurcation point between stress and aggression to bring more
peace into the world?

2) Can we build up the interfaces
between voluntary and autonomic functioning to change both how we
perceive and act?

3) Will any of these alterations,
even assuming we can learn and teach them to others, produce more than
personal meanings and intimate satisfactions? Doesn’t cultural
transformation require fundamental shifts that go far beyond the
placement of low-mediated intentions?

4) Can we, in certain special
moments at turning points in love and wisdom, send the power of
self-directed change into the world on impeccable starting gestures
that fire forth like Blake’s arrows of desire? Can we shape worldly
events with intentions made vivid in imagination? Can we release them,
precisely timed to enter the world by looping through two turning
moments simultaneously, one inside us, the other in the surrounding
environment? What access do we have to turnings in the world?

I say Yes
to all four. We can learn to leap the gap between phenomenology and
physiology.9 In fact, only
low-mediated intentions can accomplish
1) and 2). 3) takes knowing each other in the fourfoldness of love, and
engaging each other, and the tenderness and respect for this are
greatly helped by low mediated intentions. As for 4), impeccable
starting gestures, precisely timed, move more effectively as the deeds
arising from low-mediated intentions than as grand heroic exploits.

250

Empowered intentions make an impact on the world
when big changes come from small shifts in initial conditions. Turning
points, even local, personal, intensely private ones, reset initial
conditions in some small part of the world. They evoke indeterminacy.
By holding our intentions steady and making them
apt, we play parts in resetting those initial conditions in venues
inside and adjacent to ourselves. By swinging into action at the right
moment with the right starting gesture, we open a fan of likelihoods in
the world. Each radial of the fan points to different possible
outcomes, indeed, to different future encounters, meetings,
engagements, to different possible lives.
Though the vectors on the last long leg determine
the way into the turning point, the way out is free. To use that
freedom and to achieve the dramatic transformations promised in a
turning crisis, takes a precisely timed starting gesture energized by
the active emotions held in the imagery/intention complex. The
precision of the timing necessitates the smallness of the gesture.
Undertaken at the right moment, the starting gesture, only a baby step
in the right direction, stands high as an affirmation, a “yes” that has
a “no” in it because the hard choices in love and wisdom always require
us to give something up. We not only do, we don’t do. What we don’t do
becomes the road not taken. What we relinquish matters excruciatingly.
In turnings of love and wisdom what we care about most is at stake. But
the relinquishment brings liberation into action, a lightening of the
load finally, and a streamlining of the delivery system by which values
pass from the self to the world and from one generation to the next.

251

To get the right starting gesture you must inhabit
the temporal world. When time is your principal abode, you can rest on
the crest of the moment and watch space go by. When you do you see
eddies in the flow, standing waves, rhythmic reversal moments,
Wordsworthian spots in time that portend new beginnings.

252

The deeds we undertake in the turning moment count
most when they fall closest to hand.
Inevitably, they start in the moment and place we occupy. Their hold on
the world comes first from their personal relevance. They go on from
there, from that spot in time (# 247), by establishing rhythmic
resonances with nature. These resonances link us with others. In
certain social settings, our starting gestures generate entrainments
that travel as memes. I explained the basics of mimetic transfer in #
215-219.

253

Since our turning dramas intrinsically concern love
and wisdom, our creative deeds, when we time them well, ride into the
temporal flow on the active emotions of empathy and sympathy. They may
even spread far from their points of origin, though the great moments
for far-reaching change come infrequently. But when they do, they
always start small in the hearts of individuals. Of these times,
turnings and persons, Lewis Mumford wrote:

“At rare intervals, the most significant factors in determining the
future occur in infinitesimal quantities on unique occasions. Such
behavior is too erratic and infrequent to lend itself to repeated
observations and statistical order… This doctrine allows for the direct
impact of the human personality in history, not only by mass movements,
but by individuals and small groups… At a moment of ripeness, the
unseen will become visible, the unthinkable thought, the unactable
enacted; and by the same token, obstacles that seem insurmountable will
crumble away. This experience has many parallels in human history.
Suddenly, at what seems the peak of their efficiency and power,
dominant institutions lose their hold on their most devout supporters
or their most fa-vored beneficiaries; while at the same time, millions
of people who seemingly conformed with docility to these institutions
throw them off, like a dirty garment.”10

By being present to our own turnings, we increase
our power and range of choices in them, and that amplifies our
influence on events. If we conduct ourselves well, we can invigorate
the life around us in wider ways than we ever supposed. This maximizes
our usefulness in the evolving freedom of the whole and is a source of
happiness to us, as Spinoza expected.

254

The starting gesture provides the jolt that makes
the turning turn. The mildest of forces then works to reset initial
conditions, producing a bifurcation, a forking in the road. Imagine
that from this ‘Y’ two paths of potential diverge, though you have
taken neither yet. You have never had to make a choice between them
before.
After the turning, there’s no going back. The ‘Y’
has vanished. The spot in time it occupied gone. Alfred North Whitehead
described this situation well when he wrote, “Locke’s notion of time
hits the mark better: time is ‘perpetually perishing.’ In the organic
philosophy an actual entity has ‘perished’ when it is complete.”11
Robert Frost deals with this circumstance in his
poem The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow
wood,And sorry I could not travel
bothAnd be one traveler, long I
stoodAnd looked down one as far as I
couldTo where it bent in the
undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as
fair,And having perhaps the better
claim,Because it was grassy and
wanted wear;Though as for that the passing
thereHad worn them really about the
same,And both that morning equally
layIn leaves no step had trodden
black.Oh, I kept the first for
another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to
way,I doubted if I should ever come
back.I shall be telling this with a
sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I –I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the
difference.

At the ‘Y’ in the road, the smallest step down one
path negates the other. The road not taken effectively disappears.
Frost in his laconic way intentionally understates the uncertainties of
that moment when he says, “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” He
immediately adds “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I
should ever come back.”
He meant to take the less traveled way, but whether
the road he followed was actually less traveled, who knows? Frost
admits this when he says “Though as for that the passing there/ Had
worn them really about the same.”
To my way of thinking, all roads are new roads. The
road not taken and the road taken both only exist as tokens of
possibility, figments of the imagination rising in the moment of
choice. The forking in the pathway is itself small, insignificant,
inconsequential as viewed from anywhere but the path itself. The Taoist
maxim that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
catches the feeling. However, the hidden truth is that the special
conditions created in the region of the turning do not happen every
day. The big thing is to make the choice and take the step when they
do, and to know you have done so. That’s what Frost celebrates.
To make a real choice, to have the alternatives
vanish, to move from the hub of a fan to its radials, you must achieve
a full alignment of the hierarchy of freedoms. Imagining, intending,
willing and acting all must come together in the moment. Otherwise, the
indeterminacy in the bifurcation will not rise to freedom. When one or
more freedom is missing, you make illusory choices.

255

In real life, the real transformational
opportunities don’t appear on command. They’re not conveniently
scheduled to meet your hopes. Nor does the alignment of freedoms
present itself through an act of will. You seize the moment because the
moment is ready to be seized. Tremulous and ripe, the seizing is a
gentle not a rough act.
To some extent, an authentic previous turning sets
you up well for the next. But past success is not a prerequisite or a
guarantee. Life throws strange obstacles in our way. We are fallible,
so we often fail.

256

It is all about doing (See # 1.) Behind the
intention and the colorings and textures of its imagery, we are
managing a biophysical event happening inside us. We manage it by
bringing the legs of love and wisdom, approach, separation, withdrawal
and return, into new momentary relationships. We try to line them up
with happenings in the world. We want them to be apt. To get this
alignment to happen, we alter the phase, frequency and amplitude
relationships in our own bio-oscillatory systems (See # 19-22.)
We bring them under partial voluntary control. (Illustrated in detail
for self-directed healing in Chapter 15.) We use intention, imagery,
timing, gesture and deed as tools, as techniques. On the mind-body
edge, we employ the technical mind to ethical purposes. There, on that
edge, at the vanishing ‘Y’ in the moment of choice, physics and
phenomenology may touch. Intention – couched in imagery, observed by
the Watcher, and animated by an impeccably timed starting gesture –
creates the spark that flies the gap.

257

It takes a special courage of gentleness to find the
right intervention points and then perform the right starting gestures
in them from a place of immersion in the field of endeavor. To
implement these tactics you need daily practice and a training that
sharpens the skills and explores the neutral traits so that you will be
ready in the real flow of events.
Sometimes starting gestures as slight as a conscious
breath or the making of significant eye contact or the lifting of the
telephone, or saying “yes”, especially that, can generate powerful
Aikido-like low mediated follow-up actions. They move smoothly because
in their unheroic rightness they use the energy of the world to move
the world. Sometimes the actions emanating from the simplest
low-mediated intentions seem more like the passing of volition from the
world to the world – as if they don’t pass through a person at all. But
that’s not so. No intention works without a follow-up gesture
“peculiar” to the person, an idiosyncrasy, a temperament, a bent that
adds a spin, a “body English” that makes intentions effective in the
world.

258

Follow Up: The Template for Recognition

After the turning the game changes. The imagery in
which the intention was framed provides an “almost complete gestalt“.
It becomes a template for recognition.
You hold it up to the world looking for a match. It’s like a puzzle
with some missing pieces. The missing pieces draw us into the world.
We’re searching for a corresponding reality. We know the shape of the
missing pieces so we know what we’re looking for. We shine the template
around like a spotlight. We seek confirming instances. (The template is
not a static but a moving image, more like a film loop than a photo, a
vivid imagined depiction of an event or process whose main emotion is
an expectation of “something evermore about to be,” as Wordsworth put
it.)
Every confirming instance strengthens the neural net
that stores the intention. The template is refined by confirming
instances; it gets better, its spotlight brighter.
The anticipation we carry in the template sticks
with us as if it was memory, a future memory, the memory of a
sensibility, a feeling, a wash of possibilities conjured in the
imagination, a facultative memory of what it feels like to move into
non-habitual mode, to overcome automaticity and get free.
Sometimes a person watches for obvious matching
events and recognizes them by the ‘rightness’ of the moment, by the
“ah, hah!” you experience when a puzzle piece fits.
The “ah, hah!” experience rivets our attention to
events in the outer world. The confirming instances strike us as
special spots in time, sometimes as mystical occurrences, as
synchronicities or acts of divine providence. Love at first sight does
that to us.
It’s not easy to see why a longed for event
manifests in the moment it does. It’s not that the world presents us
with startlingly different options. The opportunities that follow a
turning point come mostly as chance events, or crossing points of
divergent causal lines. They are part of the usual event sequences in
the habitual arrangement of our lives. Nevertheless, they become
opportunities for change because we rise to them; we see them as
triggers for the doing of deeds. My general sense is that a new
attunement lets you see what has been there all along. But the new
attunement comes forth only from turnings in love or wisdom.
The template matching experience increases hope and
diminishes fear. Moreover, when the biology of hope blossoms, its
spreading roots firm up one’s connection with life. The neural
coalitions cooperate better, the template gets clearer and the ‘Yes’ of
life keeps one looking forward.
I can make it clearer: the world pricks the
image/intention complex into wakefulness by presenting clues that seem
to say “Pay attention now, I may be a puzzle piece.” On the occasions
when a match comes, the “ah, hah!” experience affirms it. The template
tells your body that you are pleased and you want more. It says you can
solve the whole puzzle. It urges you to find the inner/outer resonance
again. It poses this not abstractly but with a visceral rush of
interest and excitement that feels like a prevision, an elation, and a
memory of the future. Often empathy for another wells up in it. The mu wave in the sensory motor cortex
is suppressed and the mirror neurons are activated.
The charge you feel has a biophysical character. It
comes from rhythmic resonances based on frequency matching between an
expectation and an event. It feels good because it intimates belonging.
When your internal readiness meets a readiness in the world, it affirms
your role in the cosmic whole. If these are mystical experiences, we
all have them. We use them to guide ourselves along the bifurcating
ways of love and wisdom. That’s how writing of this book is working out
for me.

259

We cannot know which among our starting deeds will
turn out to be the most relevant when they first enter the world. We
cannot really plan our moves ahead of time, only in time. We cannot
know for sure the exact intention we will frame in the heat of the
turning until we do it. It may be different from the one you thought
you would frame. Nor can you know in advance the exact instant you will
put it into action. The uncertainty here is not regrettable. On the
contrary, it’s the strong bulwark of our freedom. In it we hear our
call to adventure.
Historical penetration may depend more on simple
vivid intentions than on big plans. Perhaps the smaller gesture opens
the way for the larger deeds by setting a pathway among the
interconnections of the “infinitesimal elements of free will.” On the
analogy with relay switches, the smaller will trip the larger.
Gandhi said, “There comes a time when an individual
becomes ir-resistible and his action becomes all-pervasive in its
effect. This comes when he reduces himself to zero.” One would like to
think that even with a fractional self, a least intrusive presence, not
zero but not all pervadoing egotism either, we can frame clear and sane
intentions, human intentions, bright and caring.
But we live in a culture that highly values
technological prowess, economic might and celebrity over delicate
timing, refined intentions and unobtrusive presence. How can our inner
work have any influence? It goes so much against the grain.

260

King Solomon told a story that illustrates these leveraged
possibilities. “There was a small city, with few people in it, and a
great king came upon it and surrounded it and built over it great
bulwarks. And there was found therein a poor wise man, and he
extricated the city through his wisdom, but no man remembered that poor
man.”
(Ecclesiastes. 9:13-15)
What does he mean? Is Solomon condemning the poor
man’s lack of recognition? Or is he telling us something about the
workings of wisdom here, in which, as a technical offshoot, anonymity
plays a part? The aphorism is really about aptness, courage, timing and
intention. First, the city is saved on the initiative of an individual.
Second, it happens in a small city where ethical memes fly quickly.
Third, the wise person was poor and inconspicuous, not heralded, not
celebrated, and not sought out. Fourth, the wise person saves the city
by unspecified means that were in some way not memorable, maybe not
even noticeable. Then he returns to his former life. He does not wait
around for a lifetime achievement award. The deed matters, not the doer
of the deed. Naturally, no one remembered his name, for few knew what
he had done.
But that still begs the question. What
did that wise person do? Does Solomon tell us something about
effective action follows on timing here? How did the poor wise man
bring his intentions into the world just then? What was the nature of
the “extrication” that saved the city surrounded by great ramps and
towers? If no man remembered that wise man, did he do nothing
memorable, nothing stupendous, nothing involving weapons, armies,
violence or treachery? The word “extricated” suggests something
different. But what? Did he “reduce himself to zero?” That doesn’t
happen.

261

Nobody attains the limiting case of pure
selflessness. Not in the East, not in the West. Only a living,
breathing person can seize the moment. The act asserts a personal
presence. It gives model change its motive power, its arms and legs.
The starting gesture sets up the sensorimotor pathway that connects the
emerging new model to the world. What
did the wise man do? He walked around, he talked, and he lent a
hand here and there. Nothing conspicuous, nothing to make him stand
out. Nevertheless, he saved the city. How we cannot know. To know, we
would have either to be there with him, or be him.